A 2006 documentary film about Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, Manufactured Landscapes draws its name from his series of images of quarries, mines, dams, and recycling wastelands. Burtynsky has devoted his career to producing a body of work that will provoke "a massive and productive worldwide conversation about sustainable living." To this end, he has spent several decades documenting networks of industrial incursions into the natural world. Burtynsky's "lifecycles" have examined railway cuts in the terrain, the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in central China, and the massive displacement of population that this project entailed, and the harvesting and distribution of fossil fuels, among other subjects. In their arresting compositions and lush painterly effects, Burtynsky's photographs press the relationship between the aesthetic and ethical commitments of a work of art.